George Floyd died at the hands of police officers in Minneapolis. A thousand miles to the south, in the Texas city where he was raised, two rows of police officers saluted as his coffin went past.
Hours before Floyd’s funeral began at a southwest Houston church, uniformed officers stood between the hearse and the front doors.
As relatives and friends pushed the gold coffin with blue trimming into the church, the officers raised their hands in a show of respect.
Floyd’s funeral and the public viewing that preceded it a day earlier have been a counterpoint to the fury that his death touched off in cities across America.
Floyd, who grew up in a tough public housing complex in Houston’s predominantly black Third Ward, was considered a native son, and the tone adopted by protesters, activists, elected officials and police officers has been one of honoring a grieving Houston family.
Inside the Fountain of Praise church, Floyd, 46, the emblem of an international movement whose name has been chanted by thousands of people since his death, was remembered as the son, brother, uncle and father that he was in life.
George Perry Floyd Jr. was born in North Carolina but grew up in the Cuney Homes housing complex in Houston.
He was a 1993 graduate of Jack Yates High School, where he played on the basketball team as a 6-foot-6 power forward “able to dunk with both hands.”
And he was a father of five and grandfather of two, according to the funeral program.
His relatives referred to him as “Superman.”
“The world knows George Floyd,” said Kathleen McGee, one of his aunts, surrounded by relatives, all dressed in white. “I know him as Perry Jr. He was a pesky little rascal, but we all loved him.”
Like the funerals of Michael Brown and Eric Garner in 2014, Floyd’s funeral became a moment of both national reckoning and mourning, as black leaders and Floyd’s family celebrated his life and denounced the brutality of his death.
The funeral aired live on broadcast and cable television, and as it began at noon, the New York Stock Exchange went silent for eight minutes, 46 seconds — the length of time a Minneapolis police officer held Floyd’s neck under his knee before he died.
It was the longest moment of silence on the stock exchange floor in its 228-year history.
In Houston, speaker after speaker invoked the political moment born out of what happened in Minneapolis.
“This was not just a tragedy. It was a crime,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton, the civil rights leader who delivered the eulogy.
“We must commit to this family — all of these families, all of his children, grandchildren and all — that until these people pay for what they did, that we’re going to be there with them,” Sharpton said. “Because lives like George’s will not matter until somebody pays the cost for taking their lives.”
He admonished the country’s political and business leaders for belatedly saying they were sorry for the mistreatment of African-Americans.
“Don’t apologize — give Colin Kaepernick a job back,” he said, referring to the former N.F.L. quarterback. “We don’t want an apology. We want him repaired.”
The service came after five days of public memorials in Minneapolis, North Carolina and Houston, and two weeks after the Minneapolis police officer was caught on video making the arrest that ended Floyd’s life.
On Monday, a public viewing in Houston drew nearly 6,400 people, including Gov. Greg Abbott, nurses fresh from work dressed in scrubs, new fathers holding babies and Floyd’s high school classmates.
Following Tuesday’s service, he was to be buried at the Houston Memorial Gardens in a grave next to his mother, Larcenia Floyd, who died in 2018.
In a video message, former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, offered his condolences to the family, saying he understood the weight of grieving in public.
Biden, who has often connected to people through grief after suffering deep losses in his own life, spent time with the Floyd family in private on Monday.
“No child should have to ask the question that too many black children have had to ask for generations: ‘Why? Why is Daddy gone?’” Biden said in the video. “When there is justice for George Floyd, we will truly be on our way to racial justice in America.”
Mayor Sylvester Turner of Houston announced from the altar that he would sign an executive order on Tuesday to ban police chokeholds and strangleholds.
Among other things, the order would also require police officers to give a warning before shooting.
“We honor him today because when he took his last breath, the rest of us will now be able to breathe,” said Turner, who is black.
No one mentioned President Trump, but Representative Al Green, Democrat of Texas, said that the next person in the country’s highest office needed to tackle racial inequality.
And Brooklyn Williams, a young niece of Floyd’s, called for an end to hate crimes.
“Someone said, ‘Make America great again,’ but when has America ever been great?” she said. “America, it is time for a change!”